British families demand inquiry into Lockerbie bombing

Relatives of the British victims of the 1988 mid-air Lockerbie bombing have used the 15th anniversary of the attack to urge Prime Minister Tony Blair to launch an independent inquiry.

The bombing killed 259 people on board Pan Am Flight 103 and 11 residents in the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

A spokesman for UK Families Flight 103 group said it wanted further investigations and was determined to achieve a "just resolution".

"The Government used the passage of time to erase the need to hold such an inquiry into the unresolved murders of 270 people - the biggest mass murder of the 20th century on British soil," the spokesman said.

Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 51, is serving a life sentence in a Scottish jail for blowing up the airliner, which had been en route to New York from Frankfurt and London.

He was convicted by a special Scottish court in the Netherlands in January 2001 for planting the suitcase bomb that destroyed the Boeing 747 on December 21, 1988.

Megrahi had been identified as a Libyan intelligence agent at his trial, where co-accused Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah was acquitted.

The attack, the worst of its kind in European skies, triggered years of international sanctions against Libya and its leader Moamer Khaddafi before it turned over Megrahi for trial in April 1999.

The spokesman for the UK Families Flight 103 group, which met Mr Blair in December 1998, said, "Mr Blair said he understood that the end of the criminal trial would leave unanswered many of our questions - he was right".

Megrahi was last month told by three Scottish judges that he must spend at least 27 years in jail before being considered for parole.

On Thursday, Scotland's top legal officer lodged an appeal against that ruling, arguing that the 27 years was unduly lenient.

Following Tripoli's agreement to pay $US2.7 billion in compensation to relations of the Lockerbie victims, Libyan officials approached Britain in March over its weapons of mass destruction programs, leading ultimately to the widely-hailed announcement Friday that Libya was renouncing all chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.